A Good Clean Fight (41 page)

Schneeberger's problem was getting his drivers to rush the dunes bravely enough to reach the top. It took strong nerves to keep the accelerator flat to the floor as the gradient grew worse, with the crest only seconds away; and
everyone's nerves were still suffering from the memory of catastrophe. Schneeberger pointed out that they were retracing their tracks, so there could be no danger. His drivers agreed, but all too often they ran out of momentum short of the top and had to reverse, slowly and awkwardly, all the way to the bottom.

They were losing time and wasting fuel. Some of them abandoned the trail of tire tracks and attempted to climb a lower dune, which looked easier. Each time they discovered, as Sergeant Nocken had, that the sand on a moderate slope gave a poor grip. Wheels spun and speed died. More fuel had been burned, more time used up.

The roller-coaster style of driving was not kind to the two surviving wounded. They died within minutes of each other and were buried together. Schneeberger read the brief form of words from his field service manual, and as he shut the book and looked up at the soaring arcs of silent sand that trapped him, he despaired.

Such bad luck could not go on forever, and they all felt a huge sense of relief when they came across the water-tanker which had been abandoned on the outward journey. With so few mouths left to drink, they could afford to swig as much as they liked. It was a gloriously drunken, orgiastic quarter of an hour. Men grinned and shouted and sang. Some even threw mugs of water at each other. Schneeberger did not interfere.

Spirits were high as they prepared to move on. The tanker had been left on the side of a dune and under the weight of the water its rear wheels had sunk deep in the sand. Reversing was impossible. The driver tried to climb and turn. The maneuver demanded a lot of power. The tanker lurched, and its load sloshed violently. All the weight was on one corner. There was a sharp crack.

It was a broken half-shaft and they could not repair it. They tried to tow the tanker and it very nearly capsized.
Schneeberger gave up. “Fill everything you can find,” he said, “including your bellies.”

*   *   *

It was too hot to work. The air moved sluggishly. Kellaway tried to read a list of recommended promotions among the ground crew. The sheets of paper stuck to his fingers. Skull's distant music ended; now the camp was silent. Kellaway rested his head on his sweaty forearms for a moment, and when he woke up he had no idea how long he had been asleep. Two minutes? Twenty? His watch would tell him. No, his watch wouldn't tell anyone anything. It had stopped.

Well, that wouldn't do. A chap had to know the time. The adjutant peeled bits of bumf from his sticky forearms and went out to look at the sun. Sun never stopped. Bloody reliable, the sun. He stared hard at it and learned nothing. There was nobody to ask, nobody nearby at least. Figures moved in the distance, but out there all humanity was overwhelmed by the endless waste of the desert: it turned men into feeble stick-figures, as unimportant as insects, shaped and reshaped by the casual distortions of the careless heat.

During operations, the squadron kept observers at various points beyond the perimeter of LG 181. Airmen sat on top of small pyramids of empty oil drums and gave advance warning of anything that approached, especially if it was a Tomahawk trailing smoke. Kellaway trudged all the way out to one of these observers and when he arrived he had forgotten what it was he wanted to ask.

“Not much of a view,” he said.

“Bugger-all view, sir,” the airman agreed.

He watched discreetly as the adjutant wandered all around his post and ended up staring at the simmering horizon.

“Binoculars all right?” Kellaway asked.

“Yes, sir. Very good, sir.” He swept a patch of sky, just to prove it. “Nothing doing except the brag school behind the stores.” He turned and focused on this. “Corporal Barber's got three kings, lucky bastard.”

“What?” Kellaway clambered up the oil drums. “Where?” The airman pointed. Kellaway took his binoculars. The card game leaped into view: six men in the shade of a tarpaulin, squatting around a blanket. Money got tossed into the middle. Silent laughter brightened their faces. He scrambled down and set off across the sand. The airman called out, asking for his binoculars back. No reply.

As he marched, the adjutant talked to himself. “It's all very well . . . I mean, it's all very fine and good, but who carries the can? The poor bloody adj carries the can . . .” He stopped muttering when he approached the brag school and they all stood up. “Don't give a toss for King's Regs, do you?” he shouted.

“Beg pardon, sir?” Corporal Barber said.

“You're gambling, aren't you? Don't deny it, I saw you!” He waved the binoculars. “The only game of chance permitted on an RAF station is housey-housey when officially organized by a senior NCO. You're on a 252, all of you.”

“Yes, sir,” Barber said. Nobody else spoke. It was embarrassing to be threatened with being put on a charge by the adjutant, of all people. The finer points of Air Force law got forgotten in the blue. The adjutant knew the troops played three-card brag whenever they could, and they knew he knew. Why not? The pilots played poker, and nobody tried to stop them.

A couple of the men jerked their heads: the flies were a nuisance. “Stand at attention!” Kellaway shouted. The men stiffened.

He walked slowly around them.

“You are improperly dressed,” he told an engine-fitter
wearing torn shorts and boots. He took a pace back and examined him, starting with his feet and working up to his head. “Your eyes are too close together,” he decided. “Get them changed.” If he heard their stifled laughter he ignored it. He was looking at their boots through his binoculars. “Foul. Filthy. Disgusting. Atrocious. Those are idle boots! Idle on parade, all of you. You're all too idle to be charged. Corporal! Fetch me a Bren gun. I intend to shoot these men.”

“Yes sir.” Barber hesitated. “I don't think we have any Brens, sir.”

“Then fetch a rifle. Six rifles. And a spade.”

“Sir.” Barber hurried away.

After a while, Kellaway noticed that the men were standing at attention. “At ease, you chaps,” he said. “Stand easy. No need for any bullshit here. I'm only the adj, after all. Only the poor old adj . . . Looking for Flight Lieutenant Dalgleish.”

“He's flying, sir,” one of them said. “They all are.”

“Oh.” Kellaway absorbed this unexpected piece of information. “Well, it's bloody inconvenient. How can I give him his letters if he's fart-assing about the sky?”

“Red flare, sir,” one of the men interrupted, and pointed to the west.

High over the distant desert a scarlet blob fell in a slow curve. It was the signal that an observer had seen an unidentified vehicle, possibly hostile.

“Can't hear anything,” the adjutant said.

“I can, sir. It sort of comes and goes.”

“Oh, well. Better prepare for the worst.” It was impossible to defend a place like LG 181 against even a small enemy force, so the standard procedure was to prepare to blow up all fuel and ammunition and get out fast. Already, trucks were being started. The brag school faded away, leaving Kellaway to search the horizon.

Corporal Barber found Skull and warned him that the
adjutant was in no condition to give orders. Skull took command. A look-out on the roof of Barton's trailer reported that the desert was empty of all activity except one very small, slow dust-cloud. Skull sent Barber to call off the demolition parties.

Two minutes later a German motorcycle combination came to a halt beside the adjutant. “Hello, Uncle,” Butcher Bailey said. “Look, I've captured the entire German army. Well, the first two, anyway. It's a start, isn't it? This is Hauptmann Winkler.”

“How do you do?” Kellaway said. “Could you by any chance oblige me with the right time?” He got no answer; Winkler merely shook his head, overcome by dismay. By now everyone was hurrying to see the exotic arrivals. Entertainment was scarce at LG 181: this was like a three-ring circus. “Tell you what, Uncle, I could do with some tea,” Bailey said. “Quite a lot of tea, in fact.”

“Well, you certainly can't go into the mess looking like that. You're improperly dressed, man. Where's your hat?”

“My hat?” Bailey was, for a moment, baffled. “My flying helmet? I lost it, Uncle. It's back there, about a hundred miles away.”

“Then you'd better damn well go back and get it, that's all.” The adjutant was suddenly stiff with anger. He noticed a man with a rifle and took it from him. “You know the penalty for being improperly dressed in the face of the enemy, don't you?” He worked the bolt and cocked the weapon.

“Steady on, sir,” a sergeant warned. “That's loaded.” Men fell back on all sides.

That was when Skull and the MO arrived.

“Hello, Uncle,” Skull said. “I say, are we under attack?”

“See for yourself,” Kellaway said gruffly. He waved the rifle toward Bailey and the Germans.

“Well, you mustn't shoot any of them, really you
mustn't. I haven't debriefed them yet. It's contrary to King's Regs. You know that, Uncle.”

“Oh.” The adjutant looked deeply disappointed. “I'll shoot
him
, then.” He took two steps toward the doctor and raised the rifle.

“Tell you what, I've got a better idea,” the doctor said rapidly. “If you want to do some real damage to the enemy, why not shoot that ugly thing?” He pointed at the motorcycle combination.

Kellaway turned on it and banged off five rounds of rapid fire. They all missed. The noise fled into the desert and was lost. “Well done, Uncle,” the doctor said. “That showed them who's boss.” He put his arm around Kellaway's shoulders.

“Have you seen Pinky?” the adjutant asked. “I'm awfully afraid his watch has stopped.” As they strolled away the doctor took the rifle from his hands and passed it to the nearest airman.

Skull, Bailey and his prisoners went to the officers' mess. The Germans accepted mugs of sweet tea, but Winkler refused to answer questions. “He's got the hump,” Bailey explained. “They were lost, and he thought that just because I've got a kind face I'd take them home. Now he's going to sulk until he dies, and then we'll be sorry, you wait and see.”

“What a shame,” Skull said. “He looks quite bright.”

“No, he's an intelligence officer. Wouldn't know how to fall off a log unless there was a set of instructions on the inside of the box. Where
is
everybody?”

“Well, the squadron's on a job. Obviously. Greek George is missing. He didn't come back from the same strafe you didn't come back from.” Skull noticed Winkler blink at the word
strafe.

“Probably walk in tomorrow.”

The MO arrived, smiling. “How do you feel, Butcher?” he asked.

“Fine. Terrific. Mind you, anything's bound to be an
improvement on yesterday. Yesterday I was sitting under the poor old kite, waiting for the grim reaper.”

“Ten minutes ago I was standing in the sun, expecting the same thing.” They all laughed, except the Germans.

“Where's Uncle now?” Skull asked.

“In my tent. I gave him a whacking great slug of rum and he went out like a light. He was almost asleep on his feet when he drank it. I don't think he's really ill, just . . . you know . . . doolally.”

“Sand-happy.” Bailey stretched out on a bench. “Been in the blue too long.”

“
Wüstenkrankheit
,” Winkler remarked unexpectedly.

“There you are,” Skull said. “His lot gets it too.”

“Why don't you go and take a nap, Butcher?” the MO said.

“Because I want to see the squadron land.”

“Well, they won't be long.” As Skull raised his mug of tea, the first faint groan of far-off aero engines made itself heard. “There you are. What did I say?” He stood, and the two prisoners got to their feet. Bailey jumped up, suddenly refreshed. “Come with me!” he ordered. The corporal trotted after him. Skull and the doctor followed. Winkler did not. “Come on,” Skull urged. “I'll find you a tent.”

“Someone must carry my bag.” Winkler had brought a small zip-top bag from the sidecar. “I am an officer and a prisoner of war. It is my right under the Geneva Convention.” He was quite serious.

“Who brought it in?” Skull asked, and answered himself. “The corporal. So he can take it out.” They stared at each other. “Go ahead. Your German is better than mine.”

“I have no authority. He is your prisoner.”

“You want
me
to order him to carry
your
bag?”

“Him or another. It is not my responsibility.”

“Leave the silly bag.” By now Skull was having to raise his voice to counter the sound of the engines. “We'll get it later.”

Winkler shook his head. “It is my right under the Geneva—”

He was stopped by an abrupt clamor: shouts, whistles, handbells. He cocked his head and listened. The engine-roar hardened and broadened. “Messerschmitt!” he bawled. Skull's head turned and he looked out at men sprinting so hard that their boots threw up long spurts of sand; while unseen anti-aircraft guns began a hectic, hammering series of
crack-booms
, until even their racket was swamped by the roar and rip of four Me 109s streaking past in line abreast, strafing the field at zero feet. Skull had never been so close to so many enemy fighters: their gunports blazed red flame and trailed black smoke; the pilots had faces; the tailplanes twitched; all happening just yards away. And then they were gone. What beauty! What menace! What a raucous, murderous, ear-battering roar!

Skull turned to speak to Winkler and the tent was empty. “Hey!” he cried. A foot moved. Winkler was under the table. Skull felt relieved: how embarrassing to lose the prisoner! “They've gone now,” he said. Winkler's face appeared. He pointed and vanished again. Skull turned back and saw the razor-thin silhouettes of four 109s coming straight at him. They were not a rigid line: each fighter wandered slightly up or down, as if a ripple had washed through the flight. They opened fire simultaneously. Twenty guns thrashed the desert so far ahead that Skull was astonished to see a man's body being rolled over and over by the impact. Oil drums bounced like ping-pong balls. A small truck was a small inferno. A row of tents fell as if tripped. Skull was too dazed to move until he cringed as finally the 109s bore down on him, bellowing like mechanical bulls, and flashed overhead. The mess tent danced in their backlash. Winkler grabbed Skull's ankle and Skull fell flat. “You wish to die?” Winkler shouted. Then another flight of 109s slammed across the landing-ground from yet another direction. Their cannon manufactured
a stolid
womp-womp-womp
and something huge exploded. Skull tried to dig with his head. He got a mouthful of sand. He was grateful. He wished there were more.